Language, Memory, and Affect in Diasporic Food Discourse: Austin Clarke’s Barbadian Culinary Memoir

Abstract

In his 1999 culinary memoir Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, the Barbadian Canadian writer Austin Clarke articulates a relational sense of cultural belonging—a sort of “taste of home” transposed to the diaspora—through the narrativization of the Barbadian food of his origins from a diasporic threshold. By triangulating food, memory, and affect, this essay aims to delineate Clarke’s use of a highly affective narrative language, which reflects a visceral approach to food narratives by drawing on the sensory, synesthetic, and affective aspects of memories connected with food and the practice of cooking. It demonstrates how Clarke’s narrative language, which is peppered by the skillful use of Bajan lexical and syntactical elements that structure most of the account, draws on the experiential knowledge of the black diasporic tradition to enable the accentuation and reformulation of a fundamentally diasporic sense of Canadian cultural belonging.