Fry Fry: Sierra Leonean Foodways III
by Mariam Fofana
Smɔl Mɔni
ssssssssssss
tch
skin tightening instantly
krrk
krrsh
oil climbing scales
in violent syllables
Plantain next
Soft yellow crescent moons
Plunk
cha
chhha
cha
their sweetness darkening by degrees
Knife knocking board
tk–tk–tk–
clink
click
clink
Somebody sucking salt
from thumbprint.
Traffic coughing loose down the road
PAH
brrrr
skkkk
And still
the oil keeps talking
ssssssssssssssssssssssss
through basin
through the child hovering nearby
mm
ah
hot
ah
fishbone cracking
between molars
krk.
Plantain collapsing on the tongue
shhhh
grease glossing every vowel
smolmɔni
smolmɔni
smɔl
Smoke gathers low
Voices braid
saltvoice
coinvoice
pressing
crowding dusk
into something chewable.
krrsh
tk
ssssss
through the crackle–crackle–crackle
of fishskin
until even the air
holds its breath
over the oil's long
metallic
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
waiting
to hear
what hunger
sounds like
when it begins
to brown
Artist’s Statement for Sierra Leonean Foodways Poetry Collection:
Foodways, a term coined by folklorist John W. Bennett in 1942, describes the cultural, social, and historical practices through which food is produced, prepared, shared, and remembered. I approach foodways as a repository of knowledge through which histories of labor are taken from one generation to the next. In this decadent poetry collection, I use poetry to investigate four Sierra Leonean dishes—bitter leaf, groundnut soup, fry fry, and jollof rice—as distinct epistemologies. The culinary process of each dish thus determines the formal architecture of the poem itself. I attend to the distinct practice of remembering, where the movements of the hand, the sounds of the kitchen, and the textures of ingredients preserve forms of knowledge that evade written form. In whisking together Krio and English alongside experimental typography and audio, the project expands the poem beyond the page and constructs a multimodal experience by which sound, voice, and food are intertwined.
Mariam Fofana is a Sierra Leonean & junior at Northwestern University studying Anthropology, History, and Chinese. Her research work zeroes in on West African diasporic life, with a particular focus on migration, memory, and the ways people rebuild belonging across borders. She is especially interested in using storytelling as an archive of the experiences that comprise the Black experience. The Sierra Leonean Foodways Poetry Collection is her Poda-Poda Stories Internship Capstone Project.