Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Haitian Callaloo: What You Ask for Is Certainly Not What You Get!

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2007.0158

1080-6512

Marie‐José Nzengou‐Tayo,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Haitian Callaloo:What You Ask for Is Certainly Not What You Get! Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo (bio) If you enter a Haitian restaurant, beware of what you ask for: it may not be what you'll get. When it comes to naming, it seems that we Haitians are finding ways of doing things our own way—that is, differently than the rest of the region. For example, we call breadfruit arbre véritable (lamveritab in Haitian Creole) while it is called fruit-à-pain (literally, "bread fruit") in Martinique and Guadeloupe, which is closer to the English. The name arbre véritable came about from the need to clarify the confusion we created by calling the sandbox (chataîgne), arbre-à-pain (labrapen in Haitian Creole). The same thing happens with "callaloo," which, in Haiti, does not refer to the same plant as in the rest of the Caribbean and the South of the United States. For the longest while, the word "callaloo" has been associated in my imagination with "crab." This is due to the lullaby that rocked me and all the babies of my family1 to sleep: "dodo titit, krab nan kalalou." ("Sleep my little one, crab in callaloo"). I suppose that today, one would protest the cruelty of that lullaby because of its threatening line: "si ou pa dodo, krab la va manje ou" ("if you do not sleep, the crab will eat you"). But that's another story. . . In my childhood, I even believed that my grandfather, Théophile Salnave (known as "Zo" or "Zo bouke chen" on the radio), had invented that lullaby for us, his grandchildren, because he was the first broadcaster to use Haitian Creole on the radio in the mid-1930s and he used to sing the lullaby on his radio program at Radio Caraïbes. At the time, he was trying to create Haitian alternatives to the French nursery rhymes or birthday songs we were learning. He was also busy writing motivational and educational songs for peasants. Yet, I never saw or tasted the actual dish "crab and callaloo," which sounded like a delicacy. In my imagination it became mixed with another dish, crab and eggplant stew, celebrated by Haitian poet Emile Roumer in his famous "indigenist" poem "Marabout de mon coeur."2 The poem opened with the following lines: "Marabout de mon coeur, aux seins de mandarine / tu m'es plus savoureuse que crabe en aubergine" ("My beloved Marabout with your mandarin-shaped breasts / to me, you are more savory than crab in eggplant stew"). The poem continues describing the beauty of the Marabout3 and her relationship with the poet as "tu es un afiba dedans mon calalou" ("you are tripe in my callaloo"). With "Marabout," Roumer provokingly breaks away from adopted French canonical celebrations of female beauty and sets the tone for Haitian Indigenist poetry.4 Thanks to him and to Rodolphe Legros,5 the Haitian artist who wrote the music (a slow meringue) to the poem, "Marabout de mon coeur" entered the repertoire of Haitian popular music in 1955 and became a courting song. Never mind what Freud or feminists would have [End Page 175] made of these comparisons of the female body with food or equating love with eating! For us teenagers, it was fun to mix romance with these popular dishes and we would play around trying to find our own dishes and create our own love poems. Looking back and comparing those times to life in Haiti today, I cannot help but feel that we were living in a sheltered world despite the brutality of the François Duvalier dictatorship. Or is it just a case of selective amnesia, so eager am I to forget the anguish and terror of those days? My third and final literary encounter with callaloo was in Jacques Stéphen Alexis's Compère Général Soleil (1955). In the opening paragraphs of the novel, Alexis offers a description of the night over Port-au-Prince: "Cette nuit-là, le vieux faubourg était bleu-noir. Tout le quartier Nan-Palmiste, qui pourrit comme une mauvaise plaie au flanc de Port-au-Prince, baignait dans un jus ultra-marin, une...