Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Page 18
Next, turning to me, Pashean offered to kill anyone I might want dead in Kabul for the equivalent of two thousand American dollars. When I told him that his price was absurdly high, he guffawed good-naturedly. As I had suspected, Pashean’s price was just an initial negotiating position. “We can talk price,” he said with a wink.
Like all good jesters, Pashean had some irreverent things to say about the powerful personalities of his country. He singled out Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, for particular disdain. Karzai, he intoned, was like one of the stupid mountain dogs that Afghans keep in their villages, which go off hunting by themselves in the winter only to lose their way home again in the snow. It was a parable that left me flummoxed until my friend interpreted. “Karzai has been with the Americans for so long, he has forgotten what Afghanistan is like.”
As Pashean went on, issuing a string of new quips about Karzai—none of them complimentary—I began to discern where he was coming from. Like almost everyone else in the room, Pashean was an ethnic Tajik. Hamid Karzai was an ethnic Pashtun, as were the hated Taliban whom he had replaced. Thanks to the Americans, who had handpicked him, Karzai had become Afghanistan’s interim president, but he had been forced to share his government with leaders of the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated Northern Alliance, whose fighters had swept down from Charikar to seize Kabul after receiving cash, arms, and advice from the CIA. But ever since winning a majority of the votes in the country’s first postwar presidential elections—held six months previously—Karzai had purged many of them from their positions and replaced them with his own loyalists.
Pashean accused Karzai of being ungrateful to the men who had fought in the jihad. “The mujahideen are having a hard time now. Karzai is kicking them out from the government. But if people have worked hard for you, you have to give them something in return.” He added, grumblingly, that most of the government’s U.S.-funded reconstruction projects were taking place in Pashtun areas, rather than Tajik ones, and he asked, “Why are the people who supported the Taliban being rewarded, and not those who fought them?”
Pashean knew how to please a crowd. The men in the room wore aggrieved expressions, and they nodded their heads in agreement with his remarks.
Turning to me again, he brought up the U.S.-sponsored campaign to demobilize and disarm the former mujahideen fighters. Pashean said, “The Afghans are like scorpions, you know, and the Americans are trying to cut off our tails. The Americans are trying to turn the Afghans from scorpions into harmless frogs, but it won’t work.” Pashean wore a gleeful but challenging expression. “We are turning in only the bad weapons, but keeping the good ones for ourselves, just in case we need them one day in the future.” He cackled with laughter, and all the other men in the room did too.
Pashean concluded, “We Afghans have learned how to eat for ourselves, like cows, who, with their cuds, know how to find the good stuff to eat, and how to spit out the bad.”
SUGARLAND
~ HAITI ~
AMY WILENTZ
IN HAITI, PEOPLE ARE OFTEN ON THE BRINK OF STARVATION, SO THEY think about food a lot. Haitians know what they like—it’s very specific. They like pork from skinny little Creole pigs, but not from great fat pink American pigs. They like rice grown in Haiti and cooked so that there’s some crunchy stuff at the bottom called gratan that’s burned and sweet. That’s the best part, the part “where all the grease, fat, and spices go,” a friend of mine says. They like scrawny Haitian chickens that scrounge around and eat what they find; big fat white grain-fed American chickens don’t have the right catch-as-catch-can diet for the Haitian palate. Most important, Haitians like food cooked over a charcoal fire. This doesn’t mean the food has to be cooked directly on the coals or just above them. Usually, in fact, the food is cooked in an iron pan or a big old pot over the charcoal. But for Haitians, the same thing cooked in the same pan over a gas or electric fire just wouldn’t be as good.
Haitians like some strange things, too, but all their tastes are grounded in the idea of the usefulness—and scarcity—of food. Food is not a decoration in Haiti. Haitians, like many malnourished people, are obsessed with foods that are supposed to give you energy, get you through the day. I was once invited to a tom tom lunch by a radical priest who is now an adviser to the Haitian government. Tom tom is one of many meals said by Haitians to bay fos—to give strength. It’s an African dish made with very thick, yellowish breadfruit puree. It’s my friend’s favorite dish. You pick up sticky scoops of the mash with your fingers (already a bizarre thing for a Westerner) and eat it along with a delicious liquid meat stew. You don’t even chew the breadfruit. The bits of tom tom sink like concrete into your stomach. Haitians like the way those unchewed bits of carbohydrate make even a small meal feel satisfying, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an X-ray showed that the tom tom I ate at that meal more than a decade ago is still lodged somewhere within.
In August 2010 I went out to the provinces with my tom tom–eating friend. We went way up to the northwest reaches of the island, into the profound countryside. We stayed in a church compound—a modest place. I slept on a hard bed and across the room was a big tarantula whose position I checked every few hours in the light of my iPhone (it never moved). I had come to see a gathering of peasants from the surrounding area, and they came in by the hundreds, many of them astride donkeys. For dinner one night, we ate stew prepared by the church ladies. It was delicious, but I kept getting pieces of bone, fat, gristle, and skin. I gave my bowl back to the woman who was serving and asked for some meat, please. The word for meat in Creole is viann.
But clearly my understanding of the word was wrong. “You have viann there, already,” my friend said, looking at the pieces of fat and gristle in my bowl. What I wanted, he told me, was something Haitians call chèr or flesh. But the stew had no flesh in it. Flesh is too fancy, my friend told me. Too expensive. The peasants eat gristle, fat, and skin, and sell the flesh in markets down in the towns. Still, the stew was tasty, with three kinds of root vegetables and chicken fat and pasta floating in an intense shallot-flavored broth, and pieces of dense, velvety Haitian avocado on the side.
Two of Haiti’s staples are big energy foods: sugar and coffee. Sugar and coffee were grown in colonial times in Haiti and are still grown there today. The two crops are exemplary of opposite poles in Haitian history and economics. Sugar is a plantation food requiring large tracts of flatlands and intensive labor. Coffee is a mountain crop that can be grown in small individual plots. In colonial days, sugar was grown on the plantations by slaves and coffee in the mountains, by runaways.
Sometimes I think about the first time I was given a piece of sugarcane to chew. This was decades ago, long before the earthquake that struck on January 12, 2010. I remember watching a cane and coconut salesman on the corner of Delmas in downtown Port-au-Prince chopping off a piece of a long, thick brown stick that looked something like bamboo. The traffic was going by, or not going by, and making a huge racket of blasting music and honking horns and talk, talk, talk; shouting, too. I was watching this man cut—and I had eyes only for him. He wore a black button-down shirt that draped over his thin shoulders as if they were a sharp, child-size hanger. He had on long cutoff shorts, and wore black plastic flip-flops on his way gigantic feet. He concentrated on his work and didn’t give me a lot of pleasantries, as Haitians normally will do. He didn’t want to cut himself with his long knife. He was working away, and it didn’t take him long.
Meanwhile, I was watching. He also sold coconuts that he chopped open; I was thinking that maybe that would have been easier to enjoy than this cane. The big green coconuts were sitting in a row, a few piled precariously upon the tops of others. Haitians like to drink coconut water from underripe fruit. Unlike water itself, coconut juice is always clean, and it’s sweet and refreshing. This nice man also supplied straws. And you just drank out of the shell. It’s easy to drink out of the coconut, and you naturally make the analogy: coconut shell . . . cup. But there was no t
ranslating the stick he was cutting into any food or culinary vessel one was used to. You couldn’t look at it and say cup, or plate. As the heat of the traffic jam behind me radiated toward our corner, I was thinking, This is where the word cane comes from—the hard, brown, upright stalk of the sugarcane plant. (It turns out that the word for sugarcane and for a walking stick and for a rod to punish with all come from the same root: the word canna, which is Latin for reed. Kanasik is the word for sugarcane in Haitian Creole, from the French canne à sucre.)
The sugar man did his work in an instant. He wielded a mean machete, and he did not know—nor did he care—where the word for cane comes from. He handed me a little less than a foot of stick, with the top seven or so inches peeled back to show the dense white flesh. The friend I was with gave the cane man a small amount of change from her purse. He cut a piece of cane for her, too. I looked at mine. It was like something a gardener might know what to do with. Oh, I’m going to eat this? Yeah, right. But how, I wanted to know. The friend I was with began to show me. Comme ça, she said. And she bent her head toward it. It was a devotional movement.
Is there a way to describe the taste of raw cane? I mean not just sweet, but some way to capture the entire experience. Let me try. First of all, wherever you are, if you’re eating raw cane, it’s hot out, and you’re hot and thirsty and this piece of cane doesn’t look as if it’s going to do much for you. Cane that’s ready to be consumed like this is extremely unprepossessing, like a branch of an old tree that some squirrel has knocked down and tried unsuccessfully to eat, or to kill. It looks mangled, predigested.
So you hold the dry brown stalk in your hand and you dip your head over the exposed inner wood, that’s what the white flesh is like, like fresh wood soaked in sugar juice. But until you begin to . . . to . . . to gnaw on it, you’ve got no idea how wet it is, how much juice it holds. You take a bite, and it turns out it’s all sugar juice and wood. The thing explodes in your mouth, boom, and you rip the wood away from the stalk with your teeth and chew. You look like a ruminant animal, chewing and chewing, with that stick in your hand so everyone knows what it is you’re working over in your mouth. The sugar goes right into your blood, at least it feels that way. The juice sops into your system, and you’re rehydrated in an instant.
Meanwhile there’s this unpleasantness with the wood. It’s like old chewing gum—it loses its savor, yet unconscionably, it remains on the scene. Now you have a mouth full of masticated white stalk, a sort of resistant, woody, tasteless mass that is, at all costs, not to be swallowed. I’d watch other people deal with this: they spat it out on the street, where it rested up against the curb alongside chewed-down mango pits and the split and empty skins of keneps—lychee-nutlike fruits. So I spat mine out—this is not a process that makes one feel delicate and feminine. It’s more like being a stevedore or a gangster from the 1930s, spittin’ a chaw.
It’s hard to eat anything in Haiti without having a political epiphany. Sugar is the king of madeleinelike foods here, a politico-economic treatise in itself. A whole world bursts out of it. Columbus brought the first sugarcane plants to Haiti on his second voyage to the island. After that, the entire colony under the French was involved in sugar cultivation, but the plantation economy could not survive without a slave labor force, and the beginnings of Haiti’s slave revolution in 1791 destroyed the economic underpinnings of the trade. By the time the slaves gained independence for Haiti in 1804, many of the French plantations had been burned to the ground and lay in ruins. Small cultivators grew sugar for market and for their own use, but there was no central refinery until the Haitian American Sugar Company was established in 1912. HASCO was one of Haiti’s biggest employers, but it has been shuttered in recent decades because Haitian sugar, which is grown by smallholders, has been too expensive to compete with much cheaper Dominican sugar, which is plantation-grown and smuggled into Haiti in large quantities across the border. Even after the earthquake, the cheerful red-and-white HASCO smokestack still stands, smokeless, near the edge of Port-au-Prince. In the 1980s, Haiti exported sugar; now it imports sugar. And who cuts the sugar on the Dominican Republic’s sugar plantations? Haitians, the world’s best cane cutters, who live in slavelike conditions on huge state-run plantations.
And Haitians cannot stop eating the stuff, as if it were their patriotic duty. I believe that there’s more sugar in a cup of Haitian coffee than there is coffee. Their cakes are sweeter than ours. When they make a fruit drink, it’s loaded up with sugar. Rum and klerin (a supercharged white rum) are favorite drinks, both made with distilled sugarcane. Sometimes the sugar is Haitian—especially the sugar used in klerin, which is often homegrown and home-brewed, to say nothing of hallucinogenic. Sugarcane for chewing is also a home-raised crop. It grows by the side of country roads in small patches.
I had a skinny little friend in Haiti who was dating a beautiful and ample woman, a generous, womanly woman. One day I was watching the two of them chat when another friend came up to me, nodded his head at the two, and said in an undertone, Fòmi pa mouri anba sak sik. This is one of many succinct Haitian proverbs that come right out of Haitian country life. Figuratively, it means that you can’t get enough of a good thing. But literally translated, it means, The ant does not die under a sack of sugar.
There are many other foods redolent of history and politics. Take manioc, a root vegetable that’s boiled and mashed and served with meats. It has a sweet, nutty taste. Manioc grows deep in the ground, and when you want to replant a field where it has grown, you have to pull up the whole plant to leave the earth ready for new sowing. This is called dechoukaj. When the Duvalier dynasty was overthrown in 1986 and Haitians in crowds went around the country forcing out Jean-Claude Duvalier’s henchmen, the slang for the movement was dechoukaj. So now when people eat manioc in Haiti, they think about Duvalier.
When you eat conch (lambi in Creole), you think of the slaves blowing through the twisty pink shell, which makes a deep honking noise, to herald the beginning of the Haitian revolution and call its leaders together from the plantations. When you eat pumpkin soup, the traditional New Year’s Day meal, you think of General Jean-Claude Paul, an alleged narcotrafficker who was killed in 1989 when his holiday soup was poisoned. Rice and beans is such a staple of Haitian cuisine that it is known as riz national, and it is as important a piece of the national fabric as the anthem or the constitution. Griot, or deep-fried (I mean really deep) pork bits, is so tasty and delicious, so crunchy and amusing, that it has the same name as traditional storytellers, the griots who used to go from town to town, telling complicated stories full of wisdom and jokes from the old country, Africa—where storytellers and songwriters are still called by this name.
You can’t not think about food when you’re in Haiti, about what food is available, where it’s available, and who gets to eat it and how often. At the restaurants in Pétionville, the nicer town up the hill from Port-au-Prince, you can get burgers or Bolognese sauce. You can get pâté de foie gras or grilled salmon or take-out spring rolls. You can find flank steak or skirt steak, roast chicken or poulet Créole. You can find the flesh that is not in the stew in the countryside.
When I visited in August 2010 I went out in my poncho into one of the refugee camps in the middle of Port-au-Prince’s central square during a torrential tropical storm. Like hundreds of others, this camp was slapped up by Haitians made homeless by the earthquake in January 2010. The tarps covering the tin and cardboard shacks were flapping in the wind, and all the adults were inside, taking what shelter they could. Outside, children in skimpy shorts and T-shirts were frolicking. They kicked a soccer ball and made it skip over the water; they rode pieces of cardboard in the streams that were coursing down the camp’s narrow alleyways; and they did cartwheels through puddles that were more like little lakes. They splashed in the base of a decorative fountain that is no longer in service. The grown-ups were grimmer.
I was running down the corridors at sunset, looking for some people I’
d met a few days earlier, but I was disoriented in the rain and couldn’t find their tent. There was thunder and lightning, very loud, very close. A woman sitting and looking out from a shanty beckoned me in, and I took shelter in her shack. Inside the darkness was slightly relieved by a small flashlight hanging from a piece of earthquake-salvaged rebar. The one-room lean-to was the size of a closet. A narrow, less-than-twin mattress sat on two boxes at the back. This was the house of Jésula Bellevue, who was trying to cook dinner in the rain. (Jésula means “There’s Jesus.”) Jésula’s two little battered aluminum pots sat on top of a small bright red charcoal fire just outside the shack’s opening, protected from the rain by a slight extension of the roof that Jésula’s boyfriend, Wilner Dorasmé, had somehow fashioned. Wilner was sitting on the bed inside the smoky shack, with a baby on his lap. The baby had a fever. The fire outside cast an orange glow over the interior. Jésula and Wilner’s three-year-old son, Walness, laid his head on the side of the mattress and stared at the pot in which his mother was cooking dinner. Behind the pots on the fire, a recent river, created by the storm, was gushing by. Roselaure, Jésula’s eight-year-old daughter, anxiously watched the pot. Roselaure was skinny as a rake in her red skirt and a T-shirt that advertised the country’s largest cell-phone company, Digicel. Her hair was done in a dozen tiny pigtails, each ending with a red rubber band. This was to be the family’s first meal of the day, and Roselaure was very hungry, she told me. She was bouncing with excitement, and smiled shyly at me every chance she got.
The smell coming from the pot was good, deep and savory. I asked Jésula what she was making. She was making a fish sauce for rice. The rice was already ready, and into the other pot went tomato paste, some mayonnaise, a pat of butter, a stalk of thyme, a can of what Jésula and all Haitians call “salmon” but which, unlike the salmon up the hill, is actually sardines (the can was opened with the family’s one knife), and a half cup of rainwater they’d just gathered, plus the rain that was coming down out of the sky into the pot as the sauce cooked. To this Jésula added toward the end one hot red pepper, and an onion (“You want it to stay crunchy,” she told me). It was crowded and damp and smoky and dark inside the shack, but with the food coming, it was cozy, too. When dinner was served, the family ate from one plate with one spoon, taking turns.