Bitter Leaf: Sierra Leonean Foodways I
by Mariam Fofana
Grin Wata
green and bitter,
like rainwater trapped too long
in the pleats of a roof
pluck them from their stems
pile them high
a small hill of green
palm oil catches at their wrists
an amber
honey darkening toward rust
it gathers in the lines of their skin
settles beneath fingernails
the mortar sits low in the yard
its mouth worn smooth
from decades of receiving
smoke drifts from another fire
a baby cries somewhere beyond the fence
the first strike lands.
a wet sound
leaf against wood
fiber against fiber
again
the pestle rises.
again
the pestle falls.
again
thud.
the leaves turn a malevolent green slowly
the deep green of riverbanks,
of moss gripping stone,
the leaves soften
release their bitterness
release their shape
their edges disappear first
then their veins
the pile caves inward
gets denser
when the work is finished,
the leaves rest at the bottom of the mortar,
dark as wet earth,
holding the last light of day
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.