… winey, citrusey, spicy ….. this is the hotch potch of flavours ascribed to the Fair Trade Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee on a poster at my local coffee shop. There must be something wrong with my tastebuds because all I can taste is coffee. Oh well, perhaps that’s because I usually have the decaf, which is Brazilian. Anyway, what I really like about this coffee shop is that it is as much a blend of disparate flavours as the coffee is claimed to be.
Thai-Australian owner and barrista “Harry Roaster” (as he describes himself on a promotional poster) has assembled what seems like an odd assortment of foods to go with your coffee, but are all in their different ways Sydney – if not Australian - culinary icons.
In no particular order:
The famous Harry’s cafe de Wheels meat pies (established 1938 down on the docks & sampled by people as famous as Frank Sinatra and Elton John)
Banana bread (is there a cafe that doesn’t have it?)
White & dark chocolate brownies – okay, more American that Oz, but they include that unique Australian nut, the macadamia
Hot dogs – representing the first incursion of US food imperialism, way before Maccas & KFC - although they seem to have disappeared from the menu in the past couple of weeks
Chinese steamed & BBQ chicken served with greens & rice. Well actually someone else is selling this, but they share the shopfront.
Take it all together and you have foods and beverages from thousands of years of Australian history, all continents (except Antarctica), and appealing to people from the tendy tops to the Centrelink strata of Australian society. And at $2 a cup, it’s the latter group who seem to most regularly frequent the tables and chairs on the pavement outside. I’d guess Fair Trade coffee’s usually consumed by middle class lefties like me who don’t mind paying a premium, but here the locals are buying it because it’s cheap and tastes good – and are incidentally supporting people who also struggle on low incomes, instead of the multinational coffee companies. I love that.
I can’t remember the name of the place, it’s on Brown St in Newtown. I looked for it on Google maps but their satellite pic pre-dates the cafe, which only opened in the past year, so all you can see is an empty shop. But I reckon Harry Roaster is there to stay.
AM knows how to play - under attack from two small cousins.
I was at an Australian African Network picnic on the weekend, and got to appreciate once more the benefits of being a member of this organisation. AAN is a group for people in mixed relationships and families, where one of the partners is of African background, and meeting other people at picnics & social events means you get a chance to share stories and experience with people who actually understand the challenges you face.
I took AM’s (half) brothers 50 Cedis, Abrantie and G Ketewa. AM, being now 15, scorns the whole concept of picnics – unless organised and attended by his friends – so of course he wasn’t there. Lucky I carry his pic in my wallet or no-one from that part of my life would recognise him anymore. In fact, when he got take-away from the latest AAN dinner party, one of my friends didn’t recognise him.
Another reason he doesn’t come to AAN events these days is because they are connected to what he considers my obsession with all things African. I was explaining this to someone at the picnic and she just nodded and laughed and said, “Yes, I’ve got friends who are going through exactly the same thing with their teens”. Well, it’s great to hear this from another source! I am not the only white parent who’s copping criticism.
I guess to AM it might look like I’m obsessed. I’m very involved with AAN, and as you can tell from this blog I love African music, dance, fabrics, food, etc, etc. I explained to him one day that with limited time on my hands, I usually choose to enjoy those things when I get the chance, rather than doing something more mainstream. Especially when African musicians like Salif Keita only come to Australia once in a blue moon! And also I like to learn about African history, politics and culture because – well, it helps me navigate all my different friendships and relationships. But there are also things about my own culture that I love just as passionately – literature, language, roast dinners, sponge cakes, bagpipes, Irish music, Dr Who, dry humour - the list goes on and on.
I like to think I’ve got a balance. But I’m not sure. Maybe he’s right to call me on it. It hasn’t been awful, angry criticism – more teasing really. Sometimes when watching TV he’ll accuse me of having a crush on a black character. “Don’t deny it, you know it’s true! Racist, racist!” he’ll crow. My denial only feeds his triumph over having scored against me. Or the other night I was helping him with a school assigment about gender and suggested he search online for pictures of super models – like Naomi Campbell. His response was something like “Ha! gotcha! You only thought of her because she’s BLACK! Ha ha!” I hurriedly cast around in my mind for a white supermodel. Ok, I confess, it took a minute or two to come up with Elle McPherson. “Racist, you’re racist!” he accused. “Oh yes, I’m so sorry, I do my best not to be, please, please forgive me!” I cried, pleading on my knees.
Now before you start worrying about us both, please note that this was all quite playful, even though the content might sound harsh. It ended in laughter, not tears. Play has always been an important part of the way I parent since AM was a baby. Kids are naturally playful and I believe that play helps them work through things that trouble them, express things they can’t in other ways, experiment with roles and power, become closer to their parents - and of course have fun. If as the adult you can stay light and relaxed when kids bring up hard stuff in play you can build trust, gain a lot of insight into their lives and help them heal from hurts. AM’s no longer small but I think these things about play are still true for him.
As well as that though, what he’s raising in this case is a real issue for me too. After all, he’s the black person in this scenario, so perhaps – probably? – he’s got a clearer perspective on my interests than I do. And it’s certainly true that white people often do objectify black people as exotic, fascinating, sexual, other. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of that at times. It may not be vilification, but it is still a kind of racism because it gets in the way of us seeing their full humanity. This has been historically embedded in my culture for centuries, it’s part of how we see and think of black people. As white people we need to be aware of that, reflect upon it, and stop doing it. Self-awareness and a willingness to change is more useful to everyone who cares about equality and justice, than getting defensive about a spot of unaware racism.
So when AM accuses me of being racist I don’t worry about the truth of it, I don’t take offence. Instead, I try and figure out how to keep the playfulness moving us forward. I take it as a good sign that AM can raise these issues with me in this way. A very good sign. For him, for me, for our relationship, and for the future.
Here are my two favourite resources on how play helps build closeness between parents and children:
MaameJ in her own design (tussah silk), 1985. Got that, it was the 80s!
Or he did when I was there in 1985. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was adventuring around Australia that year when I re-discovered African music while waitressing at Fitzroy Island. I lived in the Cairns area – mostly in tourist village Kuranda - for 8 months. I waitressed, bummed around, learned yoga, swam at the Barron River Gorge, tried to sell some weird clothes I’d designed at the Kuranda market, got involved with the campaigns of the local feminist group, travelled to Cape York in a Holden Kingswood. Ah yes, the 80s …
Actually the Kingswood didn’t get us right to the top, it conked out in Weipa and we flew back to Cairns. Another story.
So how did Jah fit into all this? Well FNQ attracted interesting kinds of people in those days. Probably still does, if you exclude the trillions of ravaging tourists from your assessment of the population. So it kind of makes sense that it was in Kuranda that I met the person who introduced me to more African music.
Ibina was a white rastafarian whose parents were building her a house on a rainforest block in Kuranda. I camped in her backyard on my days off from the island, with our mutual friend Breatharian. (I call her that because she was aspiring to live solely on air. Hmm. I think that ambition was stymied by her closet chocolate bar addiction).
Ibina was a retired dancer who had lived in Jamaica and danced in the US before coming back to Oz with her half-Jamaican son, JahLion. (Omigod, he must be nearly 40 by now!!) Ibina had dreds she could almost sit on and started each day with a fat spliff. She’d changed her anglo name to reflect Rasta beliefs and cooked a yummy vegetarian ital stew with sweet potatos and pigeon peas from a tree in her backyard. Here’s another recipe for it. So yes, Jah lived in far north Queensland.
Ibina inspired both Breatharian and I to learn dance. She was classically trained but her passion was Afro-style contemporary. She choreographed a special piece for the three of us to perform at the Kuranda festival that September. We practised on the spacious verandah of her half-finished house – surrounded on 3 sides by thick foliage. We danced to a Peter Tosh song: Rastafari Is.
Ibina on the left, Breatharian on the right, I'm the skinny one in the middle who's lost her balance.
Wow, almost brings tears to my eyes hearing it again. I can remember the first bit by heart. I can even remember the first few steps. The first bit was choreographed and when it moves into a long instrumental, we got to improvise for a while. It’s a long piece of music and about half way through Tosh stops singing and starts preaching, so Ibina very wisely only used about the first five minutes, then Peter Tosh faded out and Thomas Mapfumo faded in.
Thomas Mapfumo is another of those “master” African musicians – in this case a master of the mbira, or thumb piano. He’s not one of my favourites but this is a lovely piece of music. When I first heard it, it was another one of those gobsmacked moments where I’d never before heard anything like it. At the time, I had no idea who it was – it was just a track on some tape and Ibina didn’t know anything about it except that she liked it.
Breatharian and I didn’t get to dance to this, at least not in public. Ibina used it for her solo with a bunch of local toddlers pretending to be a rainstorm. You can hear the rain in the music, that’s the mbira. Breatharian and I reclined and admired her from the back of the stage, if I remember right.
Lulu's premiere public performance at Kuranda festival. Sorry it's so fuzzy.
The Kuranda festival was the climax of my stay in FNQ. A couple of friends from Sydney even came up for it. One of them, Lulu, had recently learned belly dancing and I will never forget seeing her dance for the first time. On Ibina’s rainforest verandah, in a deep blue skirt, the only light a candle. It was magic. Later, at the festival, Lulu discovered some Aboriginal women selling grass skirts and decided on the spot to buy one. She spent the afternoon sewing shells onto a brown singlet, then undulated to an enthusiastic crowd.
After the festival, Breatharian and I lost little time in fulfilling another dream, also inspired by Ibina: we hitch-hiked from Cairns to Adelaide, via Alice Springs and Uluru, to see the Alvin Ailey dance company perform. I’m not sure if Ibina had ever danced with them – her not actually being black, & all – but she certainly knew them, had gone to classes with them, was influenced by their style, and her passion was so infectious we put our crazy lives at risk to go and see them.
I’m embarrassed to admit that when we finally got there, it felt like a bit of an anti-climax, but then, we were exhausted. I’ve never really enjoyed seeing dance in huge theatres – I prefer small & intimate where you can see the sweat. And the facial expressions. Like at the Laura Dance festival. I don’t know what it’s like now, but when Breatharian and I went there a couple of months before Alvin Ailey, it was heart-stoppingly wonderful. I guess those vibrant, gutsy and dusty performances were a hard act for anyone to follow.
After Adelaide we took a train to Melbourne, Breatharian’s home town. From there I went to visit friends in Tassie, then I came back to Sydney to live, and Breatharian went to work in Weipa. I’m terrible at writing letters so I lost contact with both Breatharian and Ibina. I may never know if Breatharian fulfilled her goal of walking to Africa in a white robe, let alone whether she achieved breatharianism. I don’t know if Ibina’s even alive – she must be in her 70s by now if she is. When I went to Kuranda a few years ago I couldn’t even remember exactly where her house was, everything is so overgrown. Ah well. Those were the days.
For those who haven’t read my previous post on this topic, I’m referring to my love affair with African dance. I realise ‘African’ is a massive umbrella term so I’ll be more specific. The styles I’m in love with, and know the most about, are mainly West and Central African.
I left off in the last post implying that between 15 and 25 my life was a barren wasteland because I had no contact with African music. Strictly speaking this may not be true. I certainly was hearing a lot of reggae and two-tone, and it was the late 70s, early 80s, so it seems likely that I can across at least Fela Kuti. I can’t really remember. This is possibly because for several years I had quite a lot to do with certain recreational substances that affect memory, but I think that probably I really didn’t hear anything that grabbed me in the way the drum beat did when I was 15.
I did keep dancing during this time. I did classes and the odd performance with fringe dance & theatre groups. In one of them I even got to wear an extraordinarily uncomfortable, tower-like illuminated bird-headdress and slide down banisters on the outside of the Sydeny Opera House. In another I had to portray deep emotion whilst reciting a love poem. It wasn’t difficult, the object of my on-stage desire had his fly undone. It’s amazing how barely controlled hysterical laughter can come across as deep passion. So yes, when I say odd ….
I had friends who were volunteer DJs at the independent radio station Skid Row. Thanks to them I discovered all different kinds of music, including one of my all time favourites, Nigerian Master Guitarist King Sunny Ade. The first time I heard Sunny Ade I was mopping the dining room floor in a resort at Fitzroy Island, offshore from Cairns. This is because I was on an adventure around Australia and working for a few weeks as a waitress. The dining room was the only place on the island that had a cassette player, and a friend of mine had sent me of two cassette compilations of her own selection, which included tracks from a diverse bunch of musicians: various Sydney indie bands, Gil Scott Heron, Astrud Gilberto, and two tracks from Sunny Ade. Once again, I had never heard anything like it. And that’s why I figured it must be African. Even though it was far different to my previous experience of African music, no other explanation fitted. Turned out I was right, though I had to wait six months until I got back to Sydney to ask my friend. This is one of the tracks I heard:
This is the other one. I think of it as an anthem to all those men in nightclubs who want your number within 3 minutes of meeting you. Actually if Sunny Ade had been one of those men I may just have given it to him. Anyway …. one of the reasons I love his music is because he does things with a guitar that I didn’t know were possible. Subtle, complex, flowing, you want it to go on forever and it feels like it will. Wow. After growing up on a diet of strumming, this track was a revelation to me. Amazing things can be done if you put an African musician together with a few strings.
I was pleased to find out that he is still going strong & even performed in the US as recently as June. But why doesn’t he come to Australia!?!? I will tell you my theory about Australia and African musicians in my next post.
Sorry if I disappoint, but this post is not about my romantic past. It is about another kind of passion: dance. I have recently resumed Senegalese dance classes with the Kai Fech group. I haven’t done dance classes for about 20 years, so like reconnecting with other kinds of lost love, it’s a challenge. But a joyful one.
I have been passionate about dance ever since I can remember, since the long ago days when I twirled around our lounge room to my Dad’s records of Swan Lake and Saint Saens March of the Animals. Living in a small country town it was hard to find dance classes but I made do with whatever short term classes became available: Ballet, Scottish Country and Highland dance, even Jazz one year. But the most exciting dance discovery of my teens was when an enlightened – or possibly hippy, but at any rate very cool – teacher introduced my PE class to the truly astonishing beat of African drummers.
Looking back, I suspect it was the music of Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Or something quite similar. It doesn’t really matter who it was, it was the music – and the dance style – I had been waiting for all my life.
For a few short and blissful weeks, that teacher had us all stomping around the school oval to complex, powerful rythms. It made a welcome change from netball, I can tell you. I’m not sure how authentic the style was, but my dim recollection is that it was earthy, dynamic and rythmic. These are all qualities I’ve since learned are characteristic of African dance, so she must have had some idea of what she was doing.
Those PE classes were the first time in my life I had contact with any remotely genuine African culture. All I knew of Africa at age 15 was what I’d learned in social studies classes about tribes that ate only blood and milk, wildlife documentaries of course and possibly a bit about early hominid fossils (thanks to Dad’s armchair interest in archaeology). All a bit exotic really. Well, so was the music and dance. But it also felt much more real. I connected to it intensely, physically. But after our PE classes moved on (or back) to more conventional activities, I didn’t hear or dance to African music again for a good ten years more. Sob. I missed it. I didn’t know where to find it. At long last, it found me. More on that in a future post.
If it hadn’t been for that deep sense of connection I have felt to African music and dance, my life would be totally different today. I probably would never have met my son’s father. I wouldn’t now have our gorgeous boy, or all of our wonderful extended Ghanaian family. I probably would never have travelled to Africa. My comfort zone may never have stretched very far. I don’t know if I’d have the same passion to end racism, or the same commitment to figuring out, and helping others figure out, how to build and strengthen cross-cultural relationships. Well, maybe I would. My passion for social justice isn’t necessarily connected to my desire to dance. And I probably would still have had a great life. But I’m really glad I had this one!
These are the words of a boy called Ali, who burned an Australian flag during the Cronulla race riots four years ago. I’m quoting from a documentary about Ali’s life changing walk on the Kokoda Track last year. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, I only just discovered it today, but I have plans to sit down with a box of tissues and watch it all soon – it’s emotional stuff. Even the first few minutes show the changes in Ali’s life, from a youth angry enough to burn our flag, to a young man holding out his hand in reconciliation. If anything makes me proud to be Australian (I’m very suspicious of nationalism), it’s people like Ali. Well, perhaps that’s what make me proud to be human.
I found this doco online because I had heard that some boys from Punchbowl Boys High School were walking Kokoda this year,starting on Anzac Day(April 25). I was impressed and wanted to know more. I always think of Anzac day as being just about the (mostly) Anglo Aussies who have fought in wars, and it has meaning for me because my father is a veteran of Kokoda. But I think these boys at Punchbowl are on the money: to understand the skippies* you need to understand our history. And war has had a huge impact on how we live and how we think. More than 65 years on since Kokoda, Australians are more diverse, but we all have wars to heal from. The quote from Ali recognises that.
(* Skippies, or skips, is a slang term for anglo-celtic Australians. It’s not what we call ourselves … you probably won’t find it, ironically, in a dictionary of Aussie slang. It’s derived from the 60’s TV kid’s show about a “Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo”).
Not only did I find Ali’s story, I also discovered that the Punchbowl group is actually a mixed group of Lebanese Australians from Bankstown and life savers from Cronulla. I am pleased and proud that those community leaders are so committed to building respect and understanding between their communities. I imagine it wasn’t an easy trek emotionally, (it certainly wouldn’t be, physically) but I hope that both groups have learned a lot from each other.
Punchbowl boys is developing quite a relationship with Kokoda. I also discovered that in 2004 a group of ten boys, most of them Australian-born Lebanese Moslem, walked the track “as a rite of passage to Australian adulthood”. Here’s trek leader Major Charlie Lynn’s report to Parliament. The walk was apparently in response to media headlines that Punchbowl Boys was the worst school in Australia. Well I don’t think it could be the worst any more. I think other schools could learn a few things from Punchbowl Boys.
I’ve often thought that AM and/or his brother 50 Cedis could have a great future in ‘ethnic’ comedy. They can do the accents, they know how to be irreverant and outrageous, and they’ve got plenty of material to draw upon in our mixed up bicultural family.
Ethnic comedy in Australia – at least in public – started in the 80s with Wogs Out of Work and in the past few years we’ve seen comedians surface like Arj Barka and Akmal Saleh. I’m thinking that in a few years, African Australian kids who’ve grown up in Australia – mixed or not – will take to the stage and give me a good belly laugh. Comedy as a way to relieve the tensions of intercultural families – I can’t wait.
And it seems I don’t have to – well, at least, not for an African-Australian comedian. Mujahid Ahmed is a Sudanese comedian by night and refugee resettlement worker by day who lives in Adelaide. (I know this because he said his mum washes clothes in the Torrens River … heheh). A profile of Muj is the lead news story on African Oz this week. Okay, some of his jokes are sexist, but he still had me rolling on the floor laughing. Even though he didn’t grow up here he has some spot-on observations about the African experience in Oz and – make sure you watch both parts of his show – living in an intercultural relationship.
Check him out . Part 1:
Part 2:
I hope he’ll inspire a whole new generation. I know there’s plenty of jokes just waiting to be told.
Yesterday Australian African Network (AAN) had their end of year party. It was a great afternoon and apart from the fact that the tinnies all contained soft drink, not beer, it was typically Australian in so many ways. We had a barbie, complete with snags, wilted salads, watermelon, and a man in a hat and a funny apron wielding tongs behind the BBQ. (That was Mohamed, one of the AAN committee members). It was at a sports club in Lakemba, and right beside us all afternoon a series of cricket teams were playing, all in their whites, but culturally quite diverse. Of course half way through the day a small child stopped the game when she wandered off through the middle of it in single minded pursuit of her ‘boon’ (balloon). It was Treasure, AM’s little (half) sister. The boys all ended up in a big impromptu soccer match, there was a fantastic West African band playing, a raffle, and a few lucky people got to go home with meat trays. We’d seriously over-catered so we packed up the delicous halal beef marinated Liberian style (with peanuts, as it happens) as extra raffle prizes. It was also typically both Australian and African in being incredibly hot.
I dressed up in my newest Ghanaian dress and jewellry, had a great time dancing and chatting, and when Treasure got worn out from her adventures exploring the farthest reaches of the sports ground, I got to tie her on my back with a length of African cloth I’d brought to cover the tables. I haven’t got to have a baby on my back since carrying her around in Ghana earlier this year, and only recently was reflecting on how much I missed doing it, so it was lovely to get the opportunity. AM had actually vetoed it when we were in Kumasi, because it’s very bad for my knees – she’s three, and really a bit big for it – but he has a serious anti-Africa allergy at the moment (I’m hoping it’s a teenage thing he’ll grow out of) and wasn’t there to stop me. Heheh. It’s such a lovely thing to have a small child securely wrapped onto your back, cosy and relaxed and falling asleep. I didn’t want to take her off when it was time for her to go home. I am romanticising it of course. It probably doesn’t feel that great when you have to wear the baby all day and weed your farm or carry a head load all day as well. Or all three.
I used to carry AM on my back when he was small, but it was a bit scary then because I wasn’t used to it. I compromised by putting him in a baby pouch on my back and wrapping the cloth around that. I found it much easier to have him on my back. Western baby pouches and slings are designed for the front of the body, but I found they made simple tasks like buttering toast, or getting small change out of my wallet, quite awkward. Having him on my back gave me a lot more freedom and he liked it too.
Since then I have gained much more experience and am a competent and confident baby-carrier. I have carried all AM’s half-brothers and Treasure when I’ve looked after them as babies, plus friends’ children when I’ve babysat. I find it the easiest way to get little ones to sleep, especially if they’re getting grumpy and want to be carried but you still have to deal with older children. You just have to become skilled at removing them without waking them up, if you want a rest yourself.
I was speaking to a Somalian couple at the AAN party who told me that it’s very good for my back and that after women give birth, carrying the baby this way is good for getting their stomach muscles back into shape. Well it’s a long time since I gave birth but perhaps this could be the solution for the little tummy tyre I’d like to get rid of. And much more enjoyable than cutting fats out of my diet. Anyone need a baby carried?
ActionMan and I have been engaged in delicate financial negotations recently. I’ve been looking for some extra work to top up the family income, and he sees this as the green light for more pocket money. Not necessarily, I said, as working full time might mean I have more expenses, like travel, work clothes and perhaps more take-away food. (not to mention breaking the back of my Ghana debt).
His solution to this was to offer to cook – for a price. $10 for two meals, $50 for seven (that really doesn’t add up, does it?). And to prove that he could do it, he cooked four nights in a row: pasta, pot roast (at his uncle’s house), steak, pot roast again (at home). He did well. Everything was edible and he learned a few things about cooking. It kind of fell apart over the weekend, and when he finds out today that I didn’t get the job I was after, his enthusiasm may fall apart too.
Not that I’d agreed to $50 for seven meals. I’m open to paying $10 for two, and I might do that even without a second job, but there’s the little matter of contributing to household chores to consider. I reckon he could be doing more than he is, and I don’t think I should be paying for all of it. Perhaps i could do a trade where he cooks instead of doing other things around the house. Not that he’s doing a lot now. He reckons that when he leaves home he’s going to live in a mess because he doesn’t like things tidy anyway. I try and remind myself that I, too, was a slob when I was his age and it took cleaning other people’s houses for a job, to make me more house-proud myself.
Anyway, it was very nice to have my meals cooked for me for four days. Even though he managed to leave a thin film of grease over everything in the kitchen: salt shaker, fridge door, floor ….
It’s not that I hate cooking, it’s just that I like a bit of mental space to do it. I don’t feel I have that after being at work all day. Plus AM and I have totally different taste in food. He likes meat, I like vegies. He likes spicy food, I like “bland, disgusting” food. I like beef, he likes lamb. etc. etc.
When AM was a baby I tried to do all the right things the baby books tell you about food. Introduce one new food at a time, mashed. Start with banana, avocado, pumpkin. He didn’t like any of them. Unbeknownst to me, whenever they were home alone together DadaK would give him food straight out of his own bowl – spicy, oily, meaty Ghanaian food – and he loved it. No wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere! Many people were astonished that so young a child could eat such hot food. I can only put it down to his African genes or to the fact that I was eating a lot of chilli while pregnant. DadaK was cooking my favourite Ghanaian foods for me almost every night in the last month or two before AM was born.
AM still loves chilli and fatty meat, scorns sandwiches and salads. So feeding him is a challenge. Far better if he gets to know how to cook what he likes and all I have to do is steam some broccoli to go with my portion. Oh, and foot the bill.
I have made attempts to cook African food for AM. Well, for both of us. I’ve tried jollof rice – rice cooked with chili, onion, tomatos and shreds of tinned sardine or corned beef. But it’s never as nice as DadaK’s or Obaapa’s and I end up having to eat it all. Soggy would be the best word to describe my attempts at this classic West African dish, which DadaK pronounces as “Joylove”. Not when I cook it.
At one time before Obaapa’s arrival, DadaK moved back in with us for a while because he was out of a job and convalescing from an operation. Friends sometimes brought food over for him – invalid’s sheep head soup complete with teeth. Not for me thanks.
Faced with the challenge of trying to feed DadaK as well as AM, I got into the habit of cooking a very tasty – er – thing – to go with green bananas or cassava. It goes like this: You boil a tomato or two with a habanero chilli, some lady’s finger eggplants and/or okra. Then you grind up some raw onion with the boiled chili and salt, and roughly mash in the vegetables and some tinned sardines. The final touch is to fry a small amount of onion in quite a lot of palm oil and pour it over the top. Soft peaks of mashed eggplant poke through the rich orange pool of oil. Delectable. Truly.
The whole package is called ampesi – which as far as I can tell means ’starchy vegetables and whatever hot & salty stuff you care to eat with them’. Ghanaians seem to name their meals for the starch that’s consumed rather than the protein. Where I’d say “I had steak” they’d say “I had potatoes”. Well, probably that’s simplifying it, but to my mind it about sums up the different eating patterns of wealthy and poorer countries.
I think I make a good ampesi, at least according to the recipe I’ve outlined above, but I haven’t cooked it for years. Partly because palm oil is totally saturated and I’m trying to be healthy, but also because – guess what! AM doesn’t like green bananas or cassava. He only likes yams, which are much harder to come by and far too expensive for anyone to risk me stuffing up the cooking of them. Sigh. Now I’m really feeling nostalgic for Ghana food.
Stay tuned for my next exciting installment and recipe for a Ghanaian dish that we’ll both eat: peanut soup.
Australian African network has just released preliminary results for their online survey of people in mixed relationships in Australia. The data’s a bit skewed, cos mostly white women filled in the survey – but it’s also the first survey of its kind that we know of in Australia. It’s also a bit skewed because it’s focussing on challenges – where’s the question that asks about the positive things in mixed relationships? Well I have to take part of the blame for that oversight, (being on the AAN committee), but our observations have been that there are more challenges in mixed relationships, which is why we asked it. And the survey did provide evidence for this in that around one third of respondents were no longer in mixed relationships – but were still parenting their mixed children from those relationships.
So what did people think were the challenges? Most people named lack of connection to African culture, cultural isues and racism/prejudice from the society.
Well if most of your respondents are white, I guess it’s no surprise that connection to African culture is a problem – but really, it shouldn’t be that way, should it? Women talked about losing contact with African communities after separation and were concerned for their children. This is a complex issue – I’m not going to blame African communities for not being more inclusive – tho perhaps they could be. I think it comes down to the next big ticket item on the challenges list: cultural difference. If it’s a challenge in your relationship, then it’s going to be a challenge when you are in your (ex)partner’s African community. (I don’t mean mixed African events here, I mean just Ghanaian, or just Kenyan).
I know I’m not the only white woman who’s gone to an African community event – say a wedding – and felt awkward and isolated. Just as an African at an all Aussie event can feel out on a limb (although they may also be getting targeted with racism). It can be an experience of culture shock, unless you already have good friends in the community, or speak the language fluently, or are boundlessly confident and extroverted. It takes time to connect and feel included, and if all your connections are via your partner, you can lose that with separation and it’s hard to rebuild.
But what exactly did those survey respondents mean, when they said “cultural difference” or “cultural issues”? It’s a very broad term and not really that helpful if you’re trying to pin down what resources & support to provide to a comunity. The term can cover a huge range of things, from the jovial celebration of food, music and style that’s promoted by our multicultural policies; to acute and profound disagreement about how to raise your children, or how many people you should be having sex with; to the feeling that the rug’s just been pulled out from under your feet and there’s no floor underneath. You plummet downwards, wondering how you could have got it soooo wrong. Your culturally different partner watches, perplexed. Or perhaps they’re falling down a different crevasse.
Is that why people didn’t go into more detail on the survey? Because they couldn’t put into words that feeling of desolation when you suddenly realise that you each have totally different interpretations/ understandings / judgements about something and are not even in the same book, let alone on the same page? Or was it because to voice the specifics might feel politically incorrect, or because they didn’t want to air their dirty linen in public?
Or was it less fraught than all that? Perhaps people just didn’t think it worth detailing the pettty conflicts over how to wash the dishes (sink or running water? Anglo Aussies can get a bit tense about this: compromise with a rinsing basin), or having to cook separately because you don’t like each other’s food, or which bits of your body you think it’s appropriate to shave.
Whatever. All we can do is speculate about exactly what people mean by cultural difference, but at least the fact that people mentioned it points to it being a challenge – just as AAN suspected. However the survey did bring up other interesting data, like the fact that kids in single parent non-African households have less access to African language, and that mixed families have less extended family support, and that settlement issues like unemployment and financial problems have an impact on mixed families too.
The survey is, as I said at the beginning, skewed. I think of it as imperfect but important. There’s valuable info but mostly from one set of perspectives. If you’re in a position to redress the balance, please fill out the survey. It’s online unti late December. Just don’t forget to spell out what you mean by cultural difference!
And if you’re really feeling enthusiastic about expressing your point of view, you may also want to be interviewed for a small research project on mixed relationships. Email anniestopford@optus.net.com.au for more details.
