The flavours of mixing: Postcolonial literary representations of cooking as a feminine mode of creolization

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of food and cooking in Caribbean women’s postcolonial writings, and concentrates on the works of two women authors of Caribbean origins: Jean Rhys and Olive Senior. It explores how the representations of cooking and culinary traditions help us to rethink the process of creolization from a feminine perspective. Creolization is a process of cultural encounter and mixing that is central to the understanding of Caribbean identities. However, the theories of creolization have often omitted the role that women play in this process. This article focuses on cooking, an activity usually conceived as feminine and shows how it participates in the opposition to the continuation of racial, social, and sexual domination resulting from colonization. It demonstrates how the two selected authors tackle the topic of cooking, and how they rehabilitate this activity as an art and as a key element in the transmission of creolized cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Caribbean literature
• creolization
• Jean Rhys
• Olive Senior
• food studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Brathwaite (1971, xiv) also reminds us that, etymologically, “creolization” is derived from the word “creole” of Spanish origin (criollo). The Spanish word is itself derived from Latin and the verb creare (to create). Criollo was first used to refer to Europeans born in the colonies, but then came to refer to both masters and slaves born in the colonies.

2. Other terms, such as hybridity or mestizaje, can also be used to designate the meeting of different cultures. Unlike creolization, however, they have a biological or genetic connotation. I use the term creolization here because it seems more adequate to reflect on the complexity and unpredictability of cultural interactions in relation to nature. For Homi Bhabha ([1994] 2004) or Robert Young (1995), hybridity is not limited to its biological dimension but, like creolization, applies to culture and identities.

3. Kabir (2023) traces the origins and the evolution of the term “creolization”, from its first appearance in the 15th-century European colonial context to the present-day “creolizing turn”.

4. Senior grew up in rural Jamaica, in a small village called Troy, and her parents were peasant farmers, while Rhys’s family was wealthier: her father was a doctor, her mother’s family owned an estate on the island, and they lived in Roseau, the largest city in Dominica.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pauline Amy de la Bretèque

Pauline Amy de la Bretèque holds a PhD in anglophone studies from the University of Sorbonne on feminine poetics of creolization in the works of Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff. Her research fields include postcolonial literatures, gender studies, and eco-poetics. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature. Her publications include “Textes rhizomes et créolisation chez Jean Rhys et Michelle Cliff” in Edouard Glissant, l’éclat et l’obscur (2020) and “Memorial Excursion and Errancy in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow” in Babel. Littératures Plurielles 40 (2019).