Sphinx by Anne Garreta

Author:Anne Garreta [Garreta, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781941920084
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2015-03-15T21:00:00+00:00

I know essentially nothing of white, Anglo-Saxon, Puritan America. My own America is of black origins—the music, the voices, the food. There’s a term for that in the black community: soul. Soul music, soul food. The nourishment of the soul?

Accompanying A*** to family reunions and meals during the season’s festivities, I found myself lost in the heart of a neighborhood where white people rarely ventured—some remote suburb of Long Island or New Jersey. For two days the women had been preparing a Southern-style meal, paying tribute to the family’s roots.

I hardly know the names of these dishes, let alone how they’re prepared. I lived among this family only the length of brief visits and, from one year to the next, I ate these dishes over and over again, without ever seeking to educate myself about them. I didn’t feel the need. It sufficed simply to be there, as if I had always belonged to their world. Others in my place would probably have tried to play the explorer and make curious inquiries, as an anthropologist or a traveler greedy to understand how or why. But what did I care? I felt at home there, so much did they make me feel like a part of their family, effortlessly forgetting our differences in race, color, culture, class—everything that one might cite as possible traits of alterity. It was as if the language they were speaking and the food they were cooking had always been familiar to me.

And the old black mommas laughed with delight to see that I had such an appetite. A***, who was used to seeing me bored or indifferent when faced with earthly sustenance, was astonished and overjoyed. I was forgetting to repine, I was finally tasting life, savoring each bite without the table-talk that, in Europe generally, and in France particularly, constitutes the essential component of meals.

Even now, the taste of sweet potato melts into the taste of iced tea in my mouth. Is there anything more vertiginous than gustative reminiscence? For it upends completely the conventional workings of memory. When I recall this meal, something appears without being summoned, something that does not serve as a witness to anything, that does not help me to follow the thread of my memory. But this something returns—not under the guise of a phantom, of an immaterial representation of an object now vanished, of a perception swallowed up and designated to a bygone past, coming from the imagination to reincarnate itself feebly in the present. Instead, it crystallizes, taking on an intense, fugitive form, a carnal presence—the rebirth of a sensation whose former source has long ago disappeared. A vivid hallucination, a tangible reliving that invades the mouth and spreads down the back of the throat, taking on body, flesh, and warmth: the flavor itself, still intact, of this long-gone nourishment.

Then the taste that surfaced on my tongue is erased, mutated in the caress of this persistent flavor that I feel melt and travel to the bottom of my throat.

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