Patricia Powell: On Ackee and Saltfish, and To Terroir the Self
By Ari James
What does home taste like to you? Here at Kitchen Marronage that question is our bread and butter. Novelist Patricia Powell answered with the Caribbean breakfast dish Ackee and Saltfish.
Former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University, Patricia Powell is an award-winning author and English professor. Powell taught at Mills College from 2009 to 2022, where she led courses on fiction and non-fiction creative writing, topics on the intersection of religion and literature, and African Literature. Powell’s long tenure at Mills College in Oakland, California speaks to her connection with the tradition of Afro-Asian intimacies organic to the area during the Civil Rights Era for radical African American and Asian American communities. Professor of English at Northeastern University, Powell’s ongoing research on the healing capacities of plants has greatly inspired her forthcoming novel, Balm Yard. She brings these experiences and expertise to her current position as terroir expert-in-residence (2023-2024) here at Kitchen Marronage.
Powell’s four novels explore the intimate themes of healing, dispossession, and home–Me Dying Trial (1993), The Pagoda: A Novel (1998), A Small Gathering of Bones (2003), and The Fullness of Everything (2009)–and have won her the PEN New England Discovery Award, The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for fiction, and The Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, to name a few.
Patricia Powell sat down with me to dream about the pathways that food forge, the literalized manifestations of care and kinship, rendered real enough to taste. Powell currently holds a position at Northeastern University, where she, unfortunately, does not get to have the Jamaican national dish often these days. Made of soaked and boiled salted cod and stir fried with tomatoes, onions, garlic, thyme, and ackee–also known as ackee and saltfish–the dish is often eaten with plantains and even fried or boiled dumplings.
A distant cousin of the Asian fruits lychee and longan, ackee is native to West Africa and was brought to Jamaica with the arrival of enslaved African peoples. If prepared incorrectly, the ackee fruit, with its blush pink husk, black seed pods, and red-lined flesh, is poisonous. When prepared properly and harvested correctly, however, ackee has a nutty flavor and a bready texture. Powell is especially fond of ackee when it is roasted and then fried.
We Come Bearing Gifts
It was a testament to the ease of conversation, the excitement to share and speak of food, and Powell’s amiable warmth that, over an hour, we shared became as alight with laughter and chatter as a well-loved kitchen.
Cookhouses, canteens, mess halls, galleys–kitchens in every form are held in reverence at Kitchen Marronage. The kitchens found in the pages of literary texts and the culinary pathways of connection they create are no exception. In The Pagoda: A Novel (1998), a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper, passing for a man, finds community among the people he serves in Jamaica: “From underneath the counter he handed over half a pound of dried cod and two pounds of rice, for somehow they had become his people too; these women who cursed and haggled him one day and the next laid out their woes, begging for advice on wayward husband and lovers.”
The connection that the protagonist of The Pagoda finds with the people he serves in his shop speaks to the capacity for food, itself, to speak even when language cannot. Growing up in Jamaica, Powell didn’t have access to much Chinese food. Baked goods, however, were a totally different story. To her, Afro-Asia–in all of its messy history–tastes like the beef patties, cocoa bread, and sugar buns that her and her friends would buy from the local Chinese grocer. Tearing apart the hunks of bread to make room for the patties, Powell remembers eating this delightful pairing like a sandwich––sweet and savory all at once. Alongside sips of orange or champagne soda, just one bite, Powell tells me, “And we [would] be so happy and giddy for the rest of the day.”
Terroir: A Different Diet
“Just thinking about food makes me happy,” she tells me, laughing, about the excited dance that really good food triggers in all of us. You know the one. As terroir expert-in-residence at Kitchen Marronage, Powell helps us reimagine the possibility of terroir proper. Typically used in regard to wine-making, terroir is the in-depth examination of an environment’s influence on the flavors in a particular wine. From the soil to the weather, terroir pays attention to the spaces that nourish the grapes and emerge in the wine.
For Powell, the concept of terroir organically taps into conversations about equity, especially around public health, farming, land sovereignty, and nutrition. Rather than narrow terroir’s definition to wine and wine alone, she wonders how terroir might be seen as a practice for the self, as a constant and intentional engagement with the world and environment around us. In other words, how might we understand terroir as a diet?
Plant Dieta and its Histories
While growing up in Jamaica, bush tea was often prescribed as a cure-all. Powell tells me about her first brushes with plant medicine as a child, “If your belly’s hurting, you drink this thing. If your knee’s hurting, you drink this thing. If your head’s hurting, you use it as a compress.” Over the years, her interest in plant medicine and herbalism only grew, and she eventually graduated from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in Boca Raton, Florida in 2008, and as an Advanced Studies/Brennan Integration Work Graduate in 2022.
Powell’s imagining of terroir, as a practice for and by the self, is highly influenced by her experiences with plant dieta. Far from the fad regimens the word ‘diet’ brings to mind, plant dieta is a traditional practice from the Shipibo peoples in Peru. The plants that Shipibo shamans choose and prescribe are unique to each individual. For practitioners of plant dieta, there are plants to heal the body, the mind, and the soul–if one is only willing to learn from them. She explains, “It’s like clearing out all of the debris so that there is space for the plant to thrive. And for you to thrive too.”
The plant dieta itself can be a six to twelve month-long process, an intentional terroir of one’s mind and body; a careful curation of what is and is not consumed. It is a tradition that understands the body and mind as an eco-system, that primes the person receiving the medicine to be ready for it, to become a good host for that which heals. Powell explains, “This particular diet [has] no sugar, no salt, no alcohol, no sex, no intimacy,... or very little [of it]. [There’s] no holding, no touch, because the plant wants a pure vessel…it wants you to be completely present.”
The Shipibo peoples believe that each plant has a spirit. Beyond the physical preparation of one’s body into a suitable host for the plant, there are mental and emotional diets that occur as well. In the plant dieta, watching depictions of sex or violence is forbidden. Strong emotions must be worked through and processed instead of kept, held, or even buried. The plants themselves come in little powdered sachets that she drinks like a tea when she’s partaking in the diet, eating mostly simple, plant-based meals.
Heal Thyself from Within and Without
For Powell, this form of plant medicine is intrinsic to her imagining of terroir. “What does it mean to be responsible to myself and to my body?” She asks, wondering aloud about how the plant dieta process has changed her. “When you begin to eat like that, to take in like that, there is a huge shift in your consciousness, not only around food, but also around violence, around what constitutes a fight, how I deal with anger, how I resolve problems. And as the consciousness shifts, our expectations for ourselves shift, our expectations for our relationships shift, our relationship with the earth shifts.”
In speaking with Powell about terroir, the innate ability for food to not only link us to others, but also to help us connect with ourselves, became increasingly clear.
For Powell, the plants hold on, just as histories hold on. “After a year you need to take a break to give the plant time to grow inside you,” Powell explains, “When you're on the plant, you're in a very different environment. So the key is to go about your life without the plant, knowing it's growing inside you, knowing all the things that it has taught you, and [knowing] that you are using those gifts.”
In her forthcoming Balm Yard, Powell writes about the healing practices of rural Jamaica. Her current project wonders about herbalism and the capacity to heal generational traumas that take up space in modern bodies. “So I’ve been thinking a lot about the multi-dimensionality of healing, and how it touches me, my ancestors, my kin. And so I’ve been thinking about how the consciousness of the Middle Passage still lives in us, how it still has its imprint that still makes us behave in particular ways and makes us sensitive to particular things. [I’ve been thinking about] what it might mean to soften some of that, so that it doesn’t have the impact, so that it is not as alive in us.”
Powell speaks so fondly of the plants she took in over the course of that year, like they were cherished guests, friends or even family, for whom she has warmly welcomed into her home and kitchen–her body and mind. To terroir the self, then, is to choose and take in what nourishes and free what does not. Here at Kitchen Marronage, we know full well the power that food has to transcend space and time, to heal us across those borders.
After speaking with Powell, I cannot help but wonder how much healing and connection occurs too in the very act of cooking and in inviting others into our kitchen. As we make a dish like ackee and saltfish, using ingredients and knowledge that our ancestors once had, do their spirits join us in our kitchens? Do they, too, nourish themselves on the food, warmth, and laughter of our homes?
We think so.
Powell says, simply and with a smile, “Food is community. And so we’re creating intimacy with people. We come bearing gifts, you know, with food.”
To learn more about Patricia Powell’s work and process, visit patricia-powell.com.
