Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 58)

Several years ago, I was thrilled to learn that Mississippi singer Olu Dara would be performing at the annual Southern Foodways Alliance conference in Oxford, Mississippi. I could think of nothing better than listening to him sing “Okra,” his song that celebrated the mucilaginous pod. You see, I love okra! There, I’ve said it. I’ve lectured about the vegetable often, eaten it in any form, and I even have pictures of it on my personal and professional stationery and business cards! This small green pod tells the history of Africans in diaspora, and the love/hate relationship that most of the U.S. has with it is reflects of its history. In the South, where enslavement lasted longer than other parts of the country, and where the climate felt most familiar to Africans and their descendants, okra is revered and treated with the respect it so richly deserves. Globaly, it shows up the caruru of northeastern Brazil and in the callaloo and coocoo of the Caribbean. In the United States, it becomes the thickener in the soups and pilaus of the Carolina Low Country, and it is served up crisp and fried across much of Mississippi. It’s an ingredient in Southern succotashes and reigns supreme in many of the gumbos of New Orleans and South Louisiana. Southerners just seem to know (or have learned from African Americans) how to savor the slippery juice that the tender pods exude when they are cut. Wherever okra points its green tip, Africa has been, and the trail of trade evidenced by the presence of the pod is formidable. It turns up in the cooking of North Africa and the Middle East where it is known as bamia or bamya. It is savored curried in India where it is called or bhindi in Hindi and lady’s fingers by those of a more colonial persuasion. It’s known as fiao dou in Chinese and kachang bendi in Malay. Spain takes its word for the pod from the Bantu languages of Central Africa and calls it quingombo or ginbombo, and the Brazilian variant quiabo seems to derive from the same origins. Our American use of the word okra comes from the Igbo language of Nigeria where the plant is referred to as okuru. It is the French word for okra that takes us to the heart of the matter in Louisiana, because it also harkens back to the Bantu languages but simply uses the final two syllables — gombo. Okra has a long history. Botanists debate its exact region of origin. Once considered to be indigenous to tropical western Africa, it is now thought to have originated in northeastern African where wild okra has been found in the Upper Nile Valley. Although it has clearly been cultivated in Egypt for centuries, its origins continue to remain a mystery. There seem to be no representations of it in Egyptian tomb paintings, and texts citing it only go back to the 13th century. (It first appears in a letter written by a traveler from Moorish Spain in Egypt in 1216.) 58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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